The Great Fire of Rome: Six Days of Destruction and a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery That Still Refuses to Die
About this episode
The episode explores the catastrophic Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D., its mysterious origins, and the historical narratives surrounding it.
On July 18th in the year 64 A.D., the city of Rome erupted into one of the most catastrophic and mysterious fires in ancient history, an inferno that raged for six days and seven nights, consuming vast portions of the imperial capital and leaving a mystery that historians still argue about two thousand years later. The fire reportedly began near the Circus Maximus, in shops filled with flammable goods, and from there it swept through the crowded, narrow streets of Rome with terrifying speed, eventually destroying ten of the city's fourteen districts either partially or completely. What makes this event so enduringly strange is not just the scale of the destruction but the question of how it started and who, if anyone, was responsible. The most famous legend claims that the emperor Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned, watching the flames with a kind of theatrical delight, allegedly because he wanted to clear space for his own extravagant building projects, including his planned Golden Palace. The trouble is, the fiddle itself would not exist for well over a thousand years, so that particular image is almost certainly pure invention. Some ancient sources claim Nero was not…
Topics covered
- ancient history
- fire disaster
- Roman Empire
- historical mystery
- Nero
- urban destruction
Keywords
- Great Fire of Rome
- Nero
- Tacitus
- ancient history
- fire disaster
- Roman Empire
- historical mystery
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Tacitus
Places: Rome, Circus Maximus
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